MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making
none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No
more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of
an endowment of "grace" for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly
pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad.
I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have
you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once
the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch
him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the
gratifying reflection, "By jove! I'm being humble", and almost immediately
pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and
tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so
on, through as many stages as you please. But don't try this too long, for fear
you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh
at you and go to bed.
But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of
Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the
man's attention away from self to Him, and to the man's neighbours. All the
abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end;
unless they attain this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good
if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt
can be made the starting-point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom,
cynicism, and cruelty.
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him
think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely,
a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he
really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe
those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are
in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great
thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus
introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what
otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have
been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they
are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they
are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot
succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly
revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.
To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the
man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world,
and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or
less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done
by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his
own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as
in his neighbour's talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He
wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even
himself) as glorious and excellent things.
He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves,
including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as
themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we
must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our
Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back
to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.
His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man's mind off the subject of
his own value altogether.
He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one. Your efforts to instil either vainglory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy's side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon
to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on
improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise
niche in the temple of Fame. You must try to exclude this reminder from the
patient's consciousness at all costs.
The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient's mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings—the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the
colour of their hair. But always and by all methods the Enemy's aim will be to
get the patient's mind off such questions, and yours will be to fix it on them.
Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are
repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy
is pleased,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter FOURTEEN
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